Coupon Center at CVS Pharmacy

If you’re like me, you signed up for a CVS card years ago to get discounts at the checkout and never thought about it again. That was certainly true for me until a few months ago when I ran in to a CVS Pharmacy at Christmas to buy some tape to wrap presents. An employee asked me if I knew about the Coupon Center kiosk. When I said I didn’t, they pointed it out to me and suggested that I give it a try.

I scanned my CVS card and among the coupons that printed out was one for $5.00 off if you purchased $15. At the checkout my rolls of tape came to only $14.97—not quite $15. Making a tough decision (Ha! Not really) I bought one caramel pecan candy for 33¢ to score my $5 off.

So the next time you are at CVS, don’t forget to check the Coupon Center kiosk to see what coupons you get. Who knows, you might even end up with some candy as a bonus!

Saving Money On Older Pets

Having a pet is a source of joy that we hope everyone can experience in their lives. In addition to the entertainment, love, and companionship they provide, it has also been shown that they can reduce your stress just by having them around.

Like any member of the family, you want to take good care of them when they get older. This can mean special food or prescription medicine from your veterinarian, and sometimes that can be expensive, especially if it is for a chronic condition and you have to regularly buy more.

For non-prescription food or medicine, you can try searching online to see if you can find it for less. For example, we had two older kitties who needed special Hills Prescription Diet food. We found the same product online for less than the veterinarian charged and were able make a deal with them to price match.

There might be some savings to be had with prescription medicine as well. The same two kitties mentioned previously also suffered from hyperactive thyroids. We could have bought the medication directly from the veterinarian, but we found that the exact same medicine for our cats is used by humans. Our veterinarian worked with us to get a prescription for the pharmacy at Costco, and we saved some money.

It can be stressful enough when a loved pet gets older, hopefully these tips will help to reduce your worries just a little bit.

Happy New Years!

Happy New Year everyone!

Stay tuned for more money saving ideas coming soon!

Save Money On Gift Wrapping

You don't have to buy all your gift wrapping supplies at the store—let your imagination run wild! For example, for gift wrap try cutting up old gift bags or even brown paper lunch sacks or paper bags from the grocery store. In a pinch, they'll work as gift wrapping paper. Use old hair ribbons, yarn, or string to tie up your packages.

For homemade bows, see the earlier Frugalvore posting Save Money With Homemade Bows.

As for gift tags, I recently started using old Birthday and Christmas cards. What I do is get some scissors and cut out an interesting part of the front of the card, for example Santa's face or a ballon, but blank on the backside. Even if it's not blank on the back, you could cut a piece of plain paper the same shape and glue stick it to the back over the existing writing. Write your message in the blank area and tie your homemade tag to the gift bow with a piece of string or ribbon.

For supplies like scotch tape, glue sticks, ribbon, or string, buy in bulk or on sale if you can after the holidays.

Finally, don't be afraid to ask relatives and friends to save leftover scraps of gift wrap or other supplies that they were going to throw away and give them to you.

Save Money With Homemade Bows

When I was around seven or eight years old, my Mom showed me how to make beautiful homemade bows for our presents. I loved that it was something fun and creative that we could do together, and that it only required tape, gift wrap, and a pair of scissors. As an adult, I can appreciate the money it saves too!

It is simple enough to do, but it is one of those things that is easier to show someone than to describe. I decided that the best way to teach how to do it would be a video, so here it is. I was nervous making it, but I hope you will like it and find making your own bows as fun and useful as I have!

Making The Most Of Amazon.com

According to the 2016 Forbes listing of the world’s richest billionaires, Jeff Bezos is the 5^th richest person on Earth. His fortune comes almost entirely from Amazon.com, the online retailer he started in 1994. When it began, Amazon only sold books, but has since grown to sell just about everything.

Their enormous size and purchasing power, and lack of expensive storefronts, means that Amazon often has the best prices to be found on a vast range of products. This has led to consumers, including your trusty Frugalvore authors, to buy more and more "stuff" from them. That said, there are still some ways to save even more money shopping at Amazon and we’ll look at some of them below.

If you purchase a lot from Amazon, and you haven’t already, you should seriously consider signing up for Amazon Prime. At the time this article was written, it cost $99 per year. That annual fee gets you free two-day shipping on most items. In many cases, if the warehouse that ships your item is in the same state as you, you may even get your order delivered the next day. You will quickly get used to this and when you order online from a different retailer you’ll find it drives you crazy when your package takes several days to arrive.

But Amazon Prime doesn’t just stop there, Prime members are also entitled to a long list of other free benefits as well. Many of them will save you money.

After you’ve got Amazon Prime, the next way you can save money is to sign up for the Amazon Prime Store Card. This credit card will give you 5% back every month on all your Amazon purchases, which is pretty darn good. The drawback of this card is that the interest rate (APR) is quite high and is currently about 26%. This means you’ll definitely want to pay off your balance in full every month. There is a way to pay no interest for large purchases for six months, but if you don’t pay it off within that time you’ll get hit with the full deferred six months interest—so probably best to just avoid this possibility and pay in full.

One final way to save money on Amazon is to wait for the best price on an item before purchasing. There is a website called CamelCamelCamel.com, which allows you to view historical price information for most items sold on Amazon, and then enter a target price that CamelCamelCamel will track and then notify you if/when the item reaches that price. Clearly this is only of use if you can hold off purchasing an item until it reaches a better price. If you can wait, it is common to save an additional 5 or 10% on an item using this method.

Improve Your Credit Score

There are several factors that can affect your credit score. The most obvious of these is paying your bills on time. In fact, your payment history is the number one variable used by the credit bureaus when calculating your FICO score. This is closely followed by the amount you owe.

Now, you might assume that the more you owe, the worse it will affect your score, but it’s not quite that simple. In fact, the credit bureaus don’t just look at the amount you owe, but at a percentage that they arrive at by dividing the total amount you owe by the total amount of credit available to you. In fancy terms, this is known as your “utilization ratio,” and in general you want to keep this number under 20%.

Let’s look at the example of a person who has a single credit card. Say they owe $2,100 and that their credit limit on that card is $10,000. This means their utilization ratio is $2,100 / $10,000, which works out to 0.21 or 21%.

As mentioned earlier, most experts suggest keeping your credit utilization ratio under 20% to maximize your credit score. If you can manage it, the best way to do this would be to pay off enough of your debt to get the ratio under 20%. This way you both potentially increase your credit score and pay less monthly interest on your debt—a win-win!

If our example person can manage it, the best thing for them to do would be to pay off more than $100. Let's say they pay $200, which makes the new amount they owe $1,900, and their utilization ratio would be $1,900 / $10,000, which is a little below 20% at 19%.

But if you can’t repay some of the debt, there is another trick you might try. Contact the credit card company and request an increase of your credit limit. If the credit card company gives you enough of an increase, it can bring your utilization ratio below 20%.

Continuing our example from above, if the credit card company increased our example person's credit limit to $12,000, now their utilization ratio would be $2,100 / $12,000, which is below 20% at 17.5%.